Smithies: Still awesome at 100.
I love getting the Smith Alumnae Quarterly in the mail. I used to read it just for updates from people I know, but lately… look at all these brilliant women, living their brilliant lives! I lose myself for ages reading about them and their families, hobbies, travel, degrees, careers and friendships. Then I walk around for the rest of the day humming Gaudeamus Igitur.
My favorite update from the Spring 2012 SAQ:
“Friends and family gathered in Sarasota, FL, for the 100th birthday celebration of Ursula Setlow Pearson ['32]…. Ursula continues to lead a very busy social life (dinner dates galore), a busy cultural life (opera, ballet, theater, movies, lectures), an active creative life (poetry and memoir writing), volunteer work, and more.”
Smithies, September 20th, 2009
Cult of Eyre
I just re-read Jane Eyre for the first time since I was 16 or 17. It was the same copy, in fact, a cheap paperback with an inscription from my high school sweetheart, and part of the reason I decided to read it again was that, sitting on my bookshelf, it looked embarrassingly new, like I’d never opened it at all. Lord knows I can’t have visitors thinking I haven’t read Jane Eyre, and anyway I was in the mood for some classic fiction. It was so much better than I remembered, the speeches more dramatic, the descriptions more vivid, the characters more alive and the social commentary on mid-19th century England so much more amusing.
And then there’s Mr. Rochester, a darker, more seriously flawed figure in the style of Mr. Darcy. I’ve always had a serious Mr. Darcy problem, from way back. My fictional character crushes include Lou Grant from Mary Tyler Moore, Hyde from That 70′s Show, the Beast (as in “Beauty and the”), and pretty much every other emotionally unavailable character ever to steal a scene. It’s a power thing, but not necessarily in the way you think. The real power, for the heroine, is in getting the particular Mr. Darcy to admit his vulnerability. Here’s how it goes down in Jane Eyre, with a speech from Mr. Rochester:
“I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you — especially when you are near to me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel …come broad between us, I am afraid the cord of communion would be snapped; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you — you’d forget me.”
But the real star of Bronte’s novel is the eponymous heroine, who claims with a touch of false bravado that no net ensnares her: “I am a free human being with an independent will.” She goes on to prove this, even though it reduces her to begging. I like the foil that St. John Rivers provides to Mr. Rochester; Jane is in thrall to him, but he abuses her affection and forces her to break the spell. As a result, she returns to Mr. Rochester in perfect freedom, and offers herself as his literal right hand woman, claiming “I love you better now, when I can really be useful to you, than in your state of proud independence, when you disdained every part but that of the giver and protector.” Now how’s that for power dynamics?
Anyway, yes. I understand, finally, why my college roommate counts Jane Eyre among her favorite books, and my copy now looks much more well-loved.
Pickles and ice cream.
When I can’t think of anything to write, or a word or a phrase or a thought escapes me, I type “pickles and ice cream” as many times as it takes me to catch the word or phrase or thought that’s escaped. I think I started doing it in high school, mostly because pickles and ice cream are two of my favorite food groups (my food pyramid might look a little different than yours). I wish pickles and ice cream weren’t associated with the mad ravings of pregnant women, because I myself have never been pregnant and yet somehow whenever I type the phrase my mind spins off into thoughts of glowing ladies with fashionable haircuts knitting booties and shopping for jogging strollers. Once, in college, stuck hard on a paper that was due in 12 hours, I wrote an entire page of pickles and ice cream, over and over. Then I got over myself and wrote the paper.
I’m stuck hard on writing in general lately — so stuck that I can’t sit still long enough for pickles and ice cream, even. At the same time, I can’t NOT write. 
I’m a sight to see, hair unbrushed, sitting in front of the monitor in my pajamas, unable to write, unable to step away. Occasionally I read something vaguely interesting or useful but mostly I just reload Facebook several times a minute to see if there’s any new activity. Between ten and four or so, there usually is; things slow down in the early evening, and by ten at night it’s pretty much just me and the reload button, with its arrow pointing back to the beginning. Either my friends are all old and in bed by then, or they’ve got better things to do with their evenings. Please don’t consider me a terrible person if I secretly hope it’s the former.
Tonight my job was to sit down at ten to write, but as the hour approached I felt anxiety building in my limbs, the same way it might for a normal person before a job interview or an important doctor’s appointment. At ten I felt a wave of nausea and a sudden pounding headache, followed by the strange urge to run barefoot down the icy steps and out into the snow and be one of those people who is simply never heard from again. It could happen, you know.
The reasons why I feel so anxious about writing are trite to the point of meaninglessness and hardly worth repeating. Writing about writing — or rather, writing about how HARD writing is, oh woe is me I cannot write another word — that itself is pretty stale. But it’s more than pickles and ice cream pickles and ice cream pickles and ice cream, and today that feels like an accomplishment.
What on earth is an iguana poem?
Iguana by mafalda.foto
The prose was beautiful and not at all like my own; it had an air of otherness, and I had the impression that the book was set in Central or South America. Most of the text was lost when my alarm rang, but this snippet remained:
He had written a poem about a boy who loved a hen, and this was an iguana poem. It was to say, look how many boys I have invented to love you.
I don’t know why it was an iguana poem (I think my subconscious may have meant chameleon), but still: look how many boys I have invented to love you. It makes me breathless. I wish I knew the rest of the story.
Resolve
Like most people (or so I hope), I sometimes let my inner hypercritic run amok. In fact, in the past I’ve had a tendency to egg her on. It wasn’t healthy, it made me terribly unhappy, and it kept me feeling very small and unimportant. Sometimes I would talk myself out of even the most basic things, like trying a new recipe, because I was certain I was doomed to failure. Melodramatic, I know, but there you have it.
So last year I made a resolution: I would be kinder to myself. It was the first time in years that I made anything akin to a New Year’s Resolution, because they’ve never worked for me in the past, but I was hopeful that this year would be different.
There was no task to be performed each day, no “gratitude journal,” which meant I had no opportunity to fall off the horse and decide not to get back on. Instead, every time I caught my hypercritic taking over I reminded myself of my resolution to be nicer to myself — and calmly told her to shut the hell up.
I tried to be more forgiving of my own faults and more congratulatory over my accomplishments, however small. Made dinner? Way to go! Found time to write? Good for me, even if it is absolute crap! And hey! I brushed my hair today! Three cheers for me.
It worked. I mean, it’s an ongoing project, but I’ve gotten a lot better at recognizing when Ms. hypercritic is getting loud and shutting her down. I’ve made another single, simple, open-ended resolution this year, and I’m hopeful that it will be as successful as last year’s.
Of all the definitions of “resolve” that dictionary.com lists, my favorite pertains to music:
“To cause (a voice part or the harmony as a whole) to progress from a dissonance to a consonance.”
In other words, all you need to get from discord to harmony is a little resolve.
The sun will explode, and other disturbing realities.
Sun Bible by Denis Collette via Flickr Creative Commons
When I was a child and living with my mother and new stepfather in a small house on Baker Street, my mother had a blue upholstered rocking chair. Actually, it was tackier than that: it was blue with some kind of peacock print on it. My mother had gotten it second hand from one of her older sisters — the one who married a race-car driver and lived in a big, fancy house with a swimming pool an hour away. Her hand-me-down furniture was a fixture of my childhood.
The chair sat in the living room, in a corner, and it was most certainly my mother’s chair. The other seating in the room was a minimally comfortable daybed of wrought-iron, painted white, with a pink-covered mattress on it, and I don’t blame my mother a bit for preferring the rocking chair.
I must’ve been six or so when I sat in my mother’s lap in her blue rocking chair and she read me a picture book about the solar system. Once in a while some people would come to the school with tables and tables full of books, and we’d file down to the combination gymnasium-auditorium-cafeteria, one class at a time, to choose a book to keep.
I’d picked out a book about the solar system. It had interesting illustrations and moving parts on the cover. Inside, it was non-fiction, probably intended for someone just a little older than myself. I was fascinated, until my mother got to the part about the sun exploding.
The sun! Exploding! I felt the same kind of anxiety forming in my chest that I feel now when I think hard about post-peak oil, or climate change, or zombies. It would hit the Earth! What would happen to the people? Would they burn? Then there would be no more people, no more aunts with wealthy husbands, no more Grandmas, no more Moms reading stories to their children in tacky blue rocking chairs? This was very distressing.
I started to cry at the thought of humanity, lost. My mother tried to comfort me: Oh honey, she explained,that’s billions of years in the future! There probably won’t be any people left by then anyway! I was not comforted. I found it not impossible, but impossibly horrible to imagine THE END of humanity. Suddenly my sense of self expanded to include all of everyone, everywhere, ever, and I wanted to protect us.
It wasn’t too long after I brought home the solar system book that my grandmother passed away. She’d been fighting cancer for what seemed like years, but I don’t think it ever really occurred to me that she would die. She was too important to go anywhere, and besides, death was outside of my life experience.
I had come home sick from school, because children always know when something’s wrong, and my mother pulled my into her lap in the blue rocking chair. When she explained that my grandmother was dead, the expanding feeling was there instantly, like my stomach was full of helium balloons from the nursery up the street and might lift out of my throat at any minute.
When you’re seven, a grandmother’s death IS the death of all humanity. Okay, well maybe that’s a little dramatic. But rather than making the eventual petering out of humanity more bearable, my grandmother’s death magnified the greif: she was dead, and someday my mother and I would be dead, and so would everyone else, ever, and each death would hurt this much, over and over.
For three years after my grandmother died, my mother quietly replaced every dead goldfish with a nearly perfect match — even the silver one — without ever telling me. I was well into my teen years when she finally told me. She didn’t want me to have to deal with any more death at such a young age, she explained. This, to a girl who’s been trying to process the death of humanity since she was six.
But here I am, a grown woman with a decent grasp of our scientific future, and still (I can feel the anxiety rising in my chest even now), The End of Humanity is unbearable to contemplate. I can’t decide if the urge to fight-to-the-last is a biological imperative, or some deeper, moral unwillingness to give up the fight for justice, but there it is: I cannot help but rage against the exploding of the sun. It seems there’s little chance that humanity will go gently into that good night.